Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday.

Probably my favorite book about writing is Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, which contains the brilliant observation "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

It's a reminder to me that while I tend to separate the ideas of "a day's work" and "a life's work" they aren't really separable because lives are made out of days.

Like, today I will attend several meetings, and get a haircut, and call a plumber, none of which feels like my life's work but it is because how we spend our days is how we spend our lives which means, of course, that I should be very careful how I spend my days.

But in trying to be careful I quickly run up against a huge obstacle which is that while aspirational capitalism may tell me that I have absolute choice in how I spend my life, the truth is I don't.

Like, I have been immensely privileged in my professional life, but, even so, I don't have that much choice in what I do with my days. Like, tomorrow, for example, I cannot go to space because I have an inner ear disorder and also I'm not a billionaire.

And I cannot spend tomorrow caring for the sick in hospitals because I lack the training and expertise to be a nurse, and so on.

In fact, I can't do almost everything tomorrow, right? And the constraints of our lived reality are not generally our fault even if our social and economic structures would sometimes tell us that they are.

And so in considering that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, we must remember that we often have fairly limited choice in how we spend our days.

Most of us, however, have at least some choice. Like, I do not have to get a haircut today; I could instead do something fun and memorable with my day like drive to the world's largest ball of paint or call a friend from elementary school.

But the thing is, I would like my hair to look a little... less. And so I kinda need to get a haircut and I kinda need to go those meetings because people are counting on me to be there so that's what I'm gonna do with my day and, in turn, what I'm gonna do with a lot of my life.

Semi-related and I promise we'll get back to the Annie Dillard stuff, but sometimes I think about the actor George Raft who once said of losing his ten million dollar fortune, "Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses, and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly."

It's a dumb joke but it contains within it something that is useful to me, which is that a lot of times the work that people see as productive uses of my life is not what I actually experience to be productive uses of my life.

Like, to modify that joke to myself: I spend most of my hours idly daydreaming or driving my children to and from school. The rest of my time I squander.

Because, like, when I think about capital P Productivity I often find that what is economically or even socially productive is not what is deeply personally productive

Like, yesterday the most economically productive part of my day was making a podcast that a lot of people listen to and writing a little bit of a book that hopefully some people will read some day, but actually the most productive part of my day was the hour I spent driving my kid home from school and running errands and talking about this and that.

Because as the great philosopher Hank Green put it, "You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce."

My mattering as a person is not contingent upon my production, especially not my production that the world recognizes as productivity.

In fact, for me sometimes the most important work is in merely thinking or merely being, especially being present for those I love.

In short, when I expand my definition of productivity to include how I want to spend my life, I find that I feel better about how I spend my days.

So Hank, I'm off now for the most productive part of my day: attending some meetings, getting a haircut and picking my children up from school. I will see you on Friday.